cooladelaide.org

As for our land, well the story doesn’t improve much.

Dryland salinity affects approximately 370,000 hectares of land and wetlands in South Australia, in addition to 84,000 ha of natural salinity. This is expected to rise to 3.1 million hectares of the state’s land by the year 2050 if urgent action is not taken to reverse rising water table levels.

Former Murray Darling Basin Commission chair Professor John Lovering reckons that parts of our state are already stuffed and that salinity could not be beaten. Australia had to learn to live with it.

"This is not a copout but a recognition that the scale of the problem is so large that we can't turn back the clock," he said.

The bad news, it seems, is that so many of the things that we do everyday cause pollution. While poor farming and land management practices are difficult to turn back.

There is good news - in most cases, there are easy ways to reduce or even stop the pollution. We send more and more rubbish ‘away’ to landfill every year – the problem is that there is no away, everything ends up somewhere and we are all responsible.